About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Thursday, March 28, 2013

While I was changing trains at the Pentagon Metro today, I
spotted a banner for “Clearance Jobs”, link here.

This
is a site that screens people for jobs requiring clearances, and, guess what,
having an active security clearance is a prerequisite for registering at the
site.

I didn’t go that route because I entered the market when
homosexuality was a problem – in 1970 – although I did have Secret clearance in
the Army (yes, I served despite the ban, but could not get a TS), and again
when I worked for the Navy Department 1971-1972. I left that world for the commercial financial
space for my mainframe career.

The banner was above the turnstiles coming from the Pentagon
Building. I wanted to snap a picture of
it without people. I thought, they
wouldn’t want people with clearances being photographed, would they. In fact, in my “novel” manuscript, a high
school history teacher with a background in military intelligence works “part
time” for the CIA, and can’t tell the kids when they have a sub. He left active duty for -- you guess what
reason (DADT), but married a woman and is raising three great kids anyway. That artifact,
of my own writing, made me hesitant.
Finally, I noticed a “no photography” sign on a fence near the
turnstiles. Obviously, they don’t want
people with clearances (maybe some of them contractors and not regular Pentagon
employees or servicemembers) subject to photography. This is the only “No photography” sign I have
noticed in the Washington DC Metro system, and it isn’t very conspicuous.

How does the sequester affect "clearance jobs"? Probably not as much as the media claims.

First picture: Center for Missing and Exploited Children,
Alexandria, VA.

Monday, March 25, 2013

Are “commission” jobs predicated on door-to-door selling or
cold-calling getting harder to get by on? Yes, they are, for a variety of obvious
reasons. Many people buy on the
Internet. Many people live alone and do
not participate in the social capital that makes “unsolicited” personal
approaches more common and more acceptable.
Dealing with solicitations presents obvious security problems (at home,
by phone and even Internet) for many people.

On the other hand, there used to be an “ethic” that
hardscrabble selling was a way to start out in life from nothing. This may
still be the perception in many communities.

Generally, local and state laws do allow a certain amount of
cold solicitation. There are legal
limitations on what homeowners or tenants may do to prevent them. (The risk of involvement of weapons is
obvious.) And the “do not call” mechanism
does not stop all solicitations.

A few religious groups – the LDS Church and Jehovah’s
Witnesses – still goad their members into door-to-door proselytizing.

I recall, in early 2002 while still in Minnesota, an job ad
suggesting earnings of up to $75000 a year selling cable systems. This was after my December 2001 layoff, and I
called and asked. Yes, it was
door-to-door. Maybe it made sense then
to sell systems this way in neighborhoods with new homes, especially in areas
new to cable. Now it would not. People
generally know which vendor they want.

In 2002-2003, I worked in telefunding, cold calling, for “blue
money on credit”. I couldn’t do that
now, I have my giving all set up, and I
rarely will take a cold call visit or call.
Do unto others? One problem,
especially with the cold calls, is that there are just too many of them. There isn’t time to talk to everyone, just
like there isn’t time to read every email.
Or like an employer doesn’t have time to read every resume, if he isn’t hooked
in the first three seconds. Now I know
why. I’ve been on both ends. Time (and sometimes security) management is a
real problem.

In late 2003 I also worked briefly selling National Symphony
Subscriptions by phone. That used to be
lucrative for some people. But, really,
I pick and choose the events I want to go to.
I never buy subscriptions to the same place; that would be like buying a
time-share. It makes no sense given my
interests. It’s easier to buy on the
Internet – it really is – unless the Kennedy Center site crashes when it opens
sales to “Book of Mormon”. And then – lo
– you learn about the cheesy world of third-party vendors.

This puts a lot of people in the job market in a bad
way. Do we blame the marketing companies
for not keeping up? A lot of the stuff
being hocked – coupons, phone cards, whatever, has to be suspicious, maybe
fake. Do we blame the economy, because it’s gotten so hard for many people
to make an honest living without getting into something cheesy? Maybe – but remember we used to be a lot more
welcoming and sociable to be sold to directly than we are now. Culture has changed that much – in contradictory
directions.

We can’t have a good economy for more people without making
more things ourselves. We can’t get by
on commissions, door-to-door, cold-calling, or “always be closing”. The economy is good for some people – those with
certain advantages (genetic and environmental) that enable them to compete –
mentally, socially and sometimes athletically. Go to any suburban church in a high income
area – there are always plenty of teenagers with the skills and ability to make
it in our highly individualistic economy. You know that “these kids will be all
right”. But that can’t work for
everybody. Is this a call for a "pay your dues" social compact?

I’m not sure which aspects of shell scripting in Linux
matters the most, but piano-player fluidity seems important.

It’s pretty impressive to me how good some kids are at this
(remember those scenes early in the movie “The Social Network”? “Kids’ stuff!”

Here’s a video on the Linux kernel:

And I understand that, underneath the surface, Apple MacOS
leans heavily on Linux, although I know Apple has its own scripting language
(from having had to call support in the past to fix something on an old 2002
iMac).

Friday, March 15, 2013

On Wednesday, after taking a look at the “poorest” city in
the United States, Camden, NJ, I drove through Cherry Hill, NJ, which is where
my work career in I.T, began on February 16, 1970.

I had gotten out of the Army a week before, and as I recall
I left my parents’ home in Arlington VA early Sunday afternoon – it was snowing
– took a bus to Philadelphia and somehow got over to the Cherry Hill Inn, and
went to work officially in the RCA personnel office Monday morning.

I drove past the old RCA building, which is now just a
general office building with many tenants, and couldn’t park for a shot, but
got a picture of the street a couple blocks away, as “commemoration”.

RCA at one time did manufacturing in Camden, NJ; it’s
departure does have something to do with the decline of the city. Only Philadelphia and St. Louis have
immediate “suburbs” in adjoining states that are poorer than the cities.

Camden does have light rail (is it part of Philadelphia's?)

I didn't get such a good shot of the Navy ship at the Camden waterfront. Center city Philadelphia, acorss the Delaware River, is just out of sight in this picture. One wonder why libertarian author Charles Murray, in his book "Coming Apart" (reviewed March 14, 2012 on the Books blog), didn't talk about Camden NJ as well as the Fishtown area of Philadelphia.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

The Frostburg Museum, near the state university in
Frostburg, Maryland (on the Allegheny “altiplano”), has some wonderful
knickknacks, including a huge collection of items that show information
technology as it was in past years. The museum is open only Thurs-Sat from 12-4 when volunteers work there, and takes donations at the door.

The exhibits include older PC’s, various typewriters, cash
registers, card readers and sorters and EAM equipment, printing typeset and presses, as well as microfilm readers and various telephones.

Back in the early 1970s, when I worked at NBC in NYC, it had
run much of its general ledger operation on EAM equipment. RCA Spectra COBOL was an advance.

There are plenty of exhibits showing “real jobs”, even like
underground coal mining. Do the rest of us owe karma to those who do dirty jobs
for us? Chairman Mao thought so.

There were even some bizarre board games, including fantasy “carom”
baseball. I don’t see how it works.

Thursday, March 07, 2013

Electronic Frontier Foundation has a piece today about its
own employment policies, and mentions that it does not ask for social media
passwords, because in California, it’s the law, as it is in Maryland and some
other states. The link is here.

Actually, “don’t ask” (without “don’t tell”) is the right
policy anyway. As EFF points out, asking
for a social media password is like
asking to visit a person’s home.
Actually, in its early days with Ross Perot in Dallas, back until the
early 1970s, EDS used to do just that. They used to have a surprise “house
interview”. I heard about that in the
late 1970s from ex-EDS employees when I worked for Bradford in New York City.

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has a valuable “Fact sheet
on social media privacy” here.

The interesting concept here, as I have discussed on my main
blog, is that online behavior is becoming “privatized” because in this
competitive world, employers feel that they need to expropriate an associate’s
public social media behavior – because it could drive away clients, or be
predictive of an associate’s future possible disloyalty. No longer is there any meaningful separation
between communications done from one’s own personal computer (or smart phone)
and writing done on corporate infrastructure.
Twenty years ago, that had been a steadfast principle, accepting double
lives. But no more.

Monday, March 04, 2013

On Sunday, the New York Times “Fashion & Style” section
presented another long report, by Teddy Wayne, slamming the practice of not
just using interns but badly overworking them, particularly in media or show
business and fashion industries, link here("The No-Limits Job").

The story reports interns working 18 hour days and being
on-call all the time, and fired for missing calls on weekends or nights after
going home.

And young college graduates are finding that they have to
take several internships to get into the running for real employment, and wind
up moving back home with mommy and daddy.

Internships make sense for academic credit. Computer programming schools place students
at companies for a couple months for internships (at USLICO, which I have
written about), they were used in the early 90s). But not for years.

In fact, I recall reading a cover letter in the early 90s
(the first Bush recession) where someone offered tp work “as a volunteer” for a
while.

The NYT article discusses Ross Perlin (I didn’t realize he
is only 29 now), and his book “Intern Nation” (reviewed on Books Blog, June 8,
2011).

Below, Columbus Internships examines, “Do we have to pay an
intern?” (2011), (with respect to the Fair Labor Standards Act)

The problems in interning carry over into volunteer work,
where there sometimes is a self-serving bureaucracy. I have been criticized, in a couple of
instances where I volunteered briefly, with not knowing what was really going
on. How would I? One case involved the Whitman Walker Clinic
around 1990 (actually there were two little incidents), and then later when I
was maintaining a mailing list database in dBase4 on my laptop for a gay
activities group in 1994. To make
volunteering effective, you really need to make a time and focus commitment, it
seems.

Saturday, March 02, 2013

I saw a sticker on a contractor’s car for “Independence Air”
the other day.

This was a budget airline that ran out of Dulles Airport.

In March 2004, I actually went to a “job fair” at Dulles for
a job (“interim job”) as a gate agent.
It would have paid $9.50 an hour, and would have been a uniformed job
(time spent dressing wasn’t paid).

I remember having to make a verbal presentation. I described how I had “saved” a small
consulting company (to become Lewin later) in 1989 one day by solving a
particular problem.

I didn’t get "selected" (thankfully). Nor was I selected for Hollywood Video. I would soon become a substitute teacher (at
age 60).

But I did get to make two round trips (to Atlanta, and later
to Tampa) for only the price of a ticket tax.
So I guess just going to the interview paid off. Practically free air travel for a year. Maybe my speech on how to save a company made
an impression.

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